Sure, if you've read our article on hard drive restoration you know that there are ways to recover lost data cheaply and easily, but this can lead to a false sense of security. What happens when a hard drive dies completely? It will die eventually... make no mistake.

I've seen hard drives dropped, catch fire, make excruciating noises and simply stop for no apparent reason. You have got to back up your essential data.

Catastrophic hard drive failures happen, and when they do, even if you still have warranty support for the drive you're out of luck; no disk manufacturer warranties the data on the drive. Your only recourse is data recovery services, and they can charge enormous amounts for their services, though often only if they are able to recover the data. In the face of all this potential trouble, $100 for a new drive doesn't seem so bad, does it?